The write start - Jennifer Hallissy 2010

The Write Way
Introduction

In order to help guide your children in the “write” direction, it helps to know exactly where you’re going. Use this book to build your own foundation, as the parent of a young writer. The first part opens by reflecting on the importance of writing, developmentally speaking. It goes on to highlight the developmental stages related to writing readiness, the best ways to help children build their foundational skills, ideas for equipping children for writing success, and creative ways to encourage and inspire young writers at home. Read through this first part, incorporating whatever information and advice applies to your children (taking into consideration the developmental stages they are at right now) and your particular daily routine. These chapters will provide you with the bare essentials—all the advice and information you need to get your children ready to write.

The second part features fifty-two classic writing activities. Slip one of these projects into your children’s writing repertoire when and where it seems to fit, adapting it to their developmental level with the help of the suggested variations. Before long you will find that they will have gained the skills they need to accomplish any writing task that comes their way, and the satisfaction that accompanies the ability to call oneself a writer.

I hope you will find there are a few different ways to use this book. If you are picking it up as the parent of a scribbler, you can use it as a road map to help you guide your child along the path to writing. If your child is already starting to write letters and words, you will find it to be a handy resource to refer to as you support your child’s newfound skills. If you are the parent of a reluctant writer, the information in this book is exactly what you need to retrace your child’s steps, so to speak. Older children, revisiting their learn-to-write days as they make the transition to cursive, will benefit from reviewing the book’s advice and activities as they practice writing in a new style. And if you have multiple children of different ages, you will find that the activity variations in this book are ideal for when your kids are all sitting around the kitchen table—writing thank-you notes, shopping lists, pen-pal letters, or make-believe stories—and you want to figure out how to modify the activity to meet all your kids’ needs, no matter their different ages and stages. My hope is that this is a book that will stay on your bookshelf a long time, growing with you and your children—your handbook for helping your family’s story unfold.

So now, let’s get started. Your mission from here on out is to nurture your young writer until they know this to be true: if you think it, you can write it.